A life science recruiter's blog on placing R&D professionals.

A Collection of Articles on Career Advice and Innovation in Pharma

April 23, 2011 — Ellen Clark

Occasionally I will write about various blogs I have found that have relevant information for the type of candidates I recruit for my niche, the R&D arms of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. I recruit for my company, Clark Executive Search, PhD and MD candidates who are discovering and developing drugs or working in some capacity in the life science industry.

One blog I found quite interesting was over at LabSpaces, called Life’s a Biotech. The guest blogger was Jade and her post was titled,“Career Advice from a Rock Star of Science” and she reported on a forum she heard at AACR given by her idol, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 Nobel Prize winner. Dr Blackburn gave her advice about such topics as “choosing a postdoc”, ”failure”, “collaborations”, “letters of recommendations”, “publishing in high profile journals”, “alternative careers in science”, and “chasing ideas. “ This was all really good advice, especially for the scientist beginning his or her career.

I wrote about pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies heavily relying on the outsourcing and virtual model last week in a post titled, ” Big Pharma Outsourcing to CROs and Setting up R&D in China“. Related to this post and for those interested in starting a new company, read the post by Aliza Sherman titled “5 Reasons Why Virtual Teams Fail” over at Gigaom. Here the author writes about the reason virtual teams fail and gives some helpful and practical advice on how to avoid them. This short post is packed with information.

Another great post I read this week was over at The Invivo Blog by guest blogger Dr David Shaywitz titled “In Search of a Golden Mean: Balancing Innovation and Execution in Biopharma”. We all know big pharma is in trouble and innovative leadership is going to be required to help solve this problem. Dr Shaywitz discusses some of the top innovators now, such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, and how their methods can be applied to pharmaceutical companies. He gives an example of one big pharma leader, Mark Fishman of Novartis, who has implemented some innovative practices throughout his research labs.

These are the posts I thought worthy to pass along and I will continue to collect similar articles on pharma and career advice that might be useful to my readers for future posts.